Mud & Bloom – August 2019: summer green-fingered fun

As soon as we opened the latest Mud & Bloom box we were excited! As well as the regular spotters guide, nature quiz and plants to sew there were also two activities we were really drawn to. These were the bunting and the bracelet.

What was in the box?

• Make your own nature bracelet
• Grow your own Calendula
• Grow your own spinach
• Nature quiz
• Garden spotting guide
• Make your own bunting.

The highlights

We absolutely loved making the nature bracelet. The instructions were easy enough for my 6 year old son to do most of the work which was great. He decided to call it his ‘nature cuff’ which gave him plant power (he’s going through a superhero and pokemon phase!). It was a great activity but my only concern was how long the petals we used would last. We found more flowers than we did leaves so I am not sure if we should have maybe aimed for leaves instead!

The bunting was also a big hit (emphasis on HIT!). This did seem to involve more hard work (hammering!) than I was expecting. I think this is down to us not currently having a decent table to do this on so we had to do it on the floor and we were mindful of the hammering noises disturbing our neighbours!

It was a great way to talk about colours and the shades we see in nature. We used it as an opportunity to talk about how people used to use plants to dye materials in the olden days and were pretty pleased with the results. It’s the sort of activity that, now we know how to do it, we can do again ourselves pretty cheaply.

Sowing the seeds

We have decided to hold off planting the spinach and calendula as we are going away for a few days and want to wait until we get back. That’s one of the appealing things about Mud & Bloom; you can get started on the activities but you can also hold some back. We currently have A LOT of tomatoes from the very first box we had. These will need harvesting soon so we’re going to wait until we are back. The nature quiz (along with a couple from previous boxes we didn’t get a chance to do) have been packed in our ‘Adventure’ bag ready for our trip away so we can get extra use from those too. Thank you Mud & Bloom!